


The Bottom of the Garden

by beer_good



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Community: whichwillow, Gen, Harry Potter References, Hellmouth (BtVS), Post-Series, Witchcraft, Witches
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-17
Updated: 2017-12-17
Packaged: 2019-02-16 05:38:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,121
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13047600
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beer_good/pseuds/beer_good
Summary: Written for theWhich Witch ficathonand the prompt: What if Willow went back to the Coven after the fall of Sunnydale? After Miss Harkness dies, leaving the coven without leadership, they ask Willow to stay for just a few days and help sort things out. And hey, once you've saved the world a few times, you deserve a holiday, don't you?





	The Bottom of the Garden

**Author's Note:**

> Sort of a sequel to my previous fic [Total Perspective Vortex](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1019326).

 

**Title:** The Bottom of the Garden  
**Author:** Beer Good   
**Fandom:** Buffy, post-series  
**Pairing:** Background Willow/Kennedy, but mostly gen  
**Rating:** PG13  
**Word count:** ~3000  
**Summary:** Written for the [Which Witch ficathon](https://whichwillow.livejournal.com) and the prompt: **What if Willow went back to the Coven after the fall of Sunnydale?** After Miss Harkness dies, leaving the coven without leadership, they ask Willow to stay for just a few days and help sort things out. And hey, once you've saved the world a few times, you deserve a holiday, don't you?

So, England. Again, technically, though she hadn't had much of a choice in the matter last time and hadn't been all that _there_ either. Growing up, England had always seemed like a magical place to Willow, King Arthur and ivy-covered halls and Harry Potter and tea and magic and wisdom and so on. And Giles, obviously, who had seemed perfectly constructed to fit her image of what English people were like. Hard to believe that was almost ten years ago now. That one horrible summer she spent here two years ago hadn't really changed that image, either, what with all the witches. So even though, yeah, it was probably partly some sort of romantic image of a steam train chugging over rolling green hills that made her take a train from London to Devon, she told herself it was a good way to get in touch with some sort of real England too. Also, to catch a nap on the way after 36 hours straight travelling from the jungles of Brazil to Brasilia to Rio to London. (Obviously she could have just blinked herself there, but, responsible magic use and balancing the elements and all that.)

The first thing she saw at King's Cross train station was the sign for platform 9¾. Complete with a fake luggage trolley stuck halfway into the brick wall and a long line of tourists standing in line to be photographed in Harry Potter scarves while commuters hurried past. So, yeah. Reality. If Dawnie had been with her, she would have made them both get in line and have their pictures taken; of course, with all the work setting up the new Council and tracking down Slayers all over the world she hadn't even seen Dawn in … wow, two months, really?

Once aboard the train (electric, modern, very prosaic), she gave Kennedy a quick call ("I'm here." "Yeah, it's not raining, I'm kinda disappointed." "A fortnight's two weeks, sweetie. I won't be _that_ long." "Love you too.") Then she sat back and just looked out the window and dozed until she got to the station where Althanea picked her up to drive her to the funeral of Miss Harkness, whose coven had once saved Willow's life.

 

* * *

The day after the funeral, all she really wanted to do was stay in bed for a few more hours until her internal clock sorted itself out, but she'd promised Althanea that they'd grab lunch and catch up, and so she had a long shower, pulled her non-funeral outfit out of her bag, remembered to give Kennedy a quick call and moseyed downstairs just as the other witch pulled up outside the b&b in her car, sunglasses on despite the overcast weather, to drive them down to a local pub which seemed straight out of a tourist brochure.

Willow raised an eyebrow when Althanea came back to their table with two pints of beer. "Um… 11 in the morning?"

"Special post-funeral situation. Unless you don't...? I know a great detoxication spell if you're worried about that."

"No, no, it's fine." She took a sip and shot a glance at Althanea as the other witch downed half her glass in one go before taking off her sunglasses and looking at Willow. Her eyes were red.

"It's good to see you again, Willow. I'm glad you came."  
  
Willow agreed. Althanea was the closest thing to a friend she'd made two years ago. ”To be honest, I wasn't gonna. Kinda had my fill of funerals, y'know? But I figured I owe her and all you guys my life, and it was … nice, I guess, as funerals go." Good to see a funeral where the dates on the stone didn't start with nineteeneightysomething, she didn't say. "How are you holding up?"

Althanea took another gulp and shrugged. "She was 83. It's… wot it is, innit?" She flashed a small grin at the brief lapse of accent as she wiped at the corner of her eye. Willow didn't know a whole lot about Althanea's past, but she knew she hadn't been born with that name, or with the perfect BBC English she spoke for the most part. She'd said that as far as she was concerned, her life had begun when she came to the coven at 16. Never one of the most devout Wiccans, but well on her way to becoming one of their most powerful. Not that she'd say so around Willow.

"I never knew her first name,” Willow said. ”I guess it didn’t occur to me that she had one.”

”Oh, I know. I was here for a year before I found out. I suppose ’Irene’ didn't quite have that air of mystery and ancient wisdom she was going for.” Their food arrived, and Althanea emptied her glass and got up to get two more.

They talked about other stuff for a while, reminiscing about some of the less painful bits, catching up on the state of the coven and on working to stop the world from ending. Willow silently thanked the goddess of hops that English ale wasn't very strong. Eventually Althanea seemed to have gathered enough courage to ask for a favour.

"Woah, hang on," Willow replied. "You want _me_ to go over Miss Harkness' papers?"

"I know, I know. But it's … Look, we're a witches' coven in 21st century Britain, which may not be strictly _illegal_ for the most part, but we still can't have an attorney poke around in our business. And as for any of us doing it, it's … " Althanea sighed. "I love my sisters. But we all came here for different reasons, and right now none of us have any idea of what we're supposed to do without Miss Harkness. She _was_ this coven. If she left any instructions for how to carry on, we need to find them, and we need someone impartial to do it. And I thought, you're clever, you can read something like fifteen languages, and you're always talking about how you miss just being a regular student. So I asked the others what they thought of the idea, and they agreed."

"But I mean, you guys are an ancient coven, right? Surely this must have happened before?"

Althanea lifted an eyebrow. "Yeah, Miss Harkness liked to pretend we went back to the druids and all that, but she pretty much founded the coven from scratch back in nineteen sixty… six or seven, I’m not entirely sure. There was a lot of interest in the occult back then, and some took it more seriously than others.”

Willow shook her head. "Wow. I guess that explains that photo of her with Mick Jagger."

"That, and the patch of top-grade green behind her hut. But anyway, what do you say?"

And Willow should have said that she had other duties, and people were waiting for her, and there were always apocalypses somewhere where she'd be needed to back up girls who fought demons hand to hand. Then again, if the Council couldn't do without her for a few more days they were in bigger trouble than any of them knew. So she called Kennedy and said she would be staying an extra week.

 

* * *

It was surprisingly easy to fall into the routines of the coven again, and even if many of the other witches were reserved around her (Althanea claimed they were just being British) they made her feel welcome. She'd spent so much of that summer focused on herself that she'd barely noticed how the whole thing seemed to be set up almost explicitly for cases like hers. Going through Miss Harkness' papers, she understood why. The old witch's house, which would have looked straight out of Tolkien if not for the brand-new utilities, the computer, and the handrails in the shower, had books and notes and manuscripts and scrolls amassed over 40 years piled everywhere. Including carefully labeled files that included professional - if more magic-focused than most and, as far as Willow's long-neglected Psych major held up, somewhat outdated - psychological assessments of most of the members of the coven. Including herself.

"Sure," said Althanea when Willow asked her about it. "I guess she was a psychiatrist back in the real world. And of course we all had our sessions with her. The point of this place is to better the world, starting with taking control of yourself, and some of us needed it more than others."

"And you're OK with me reading this?" Willow held up Althanea's own file.

"As far as we're concerned, whatever helps you figure it out, and as long as you do it without judgment, go ahead."

No judgment. Willow nodded. "You know, the first time I came here I was pretty sure you guys were going to have me killed or de-fanged or locked away."

"Yeah." Althanea laughed. "I overheard Mr Giles asking her about what sort of 'protocols' - that's the word he used - we had in place for dealing with rogue witches. Do you know what she said?"

"No?"

Althanea did an uncanny impersonation of the old witch. "'Mr Giles, are you suggesting that we, as a witches' coven, reinstate the practice of witch trials?' I've never seen a man clean his glasses that way before."

"Oh yeah, he does that." Willow laughed and briefly wondered how long it had been since she'd seen Giles. He was supposedly in Russia right now looking for a newly called Slayer somewhere in the middle of nowhere.

"And don't get me wrong, you _are_ pretty scary. The first time I caught a whiff of what you've got inside you, I felt like someone on a bicycle being overtaken by a jetfighter. But ... " She seemed to be looking for words. "Please don't take this the wrong way, but the way you tried to handle it back home probably didn't help. I'm sure your friends meant well," she added when she saw Willow's face tighten. "Maybe you all just watched too many of those American TV shows about not doing drugs and thought magic worked the same way. But magic isn't a drug, Willow. Drugs are drugs." Althanea absent-mindedly tugged at her long sleeves. "Magic just _is_. You got your hands on more power than you knew how to handle, but … Miss Harkness would never have punished you for that. She knew you were a good person, and that you just needed to learn how to handle it."

"Like not killing people."

Althanea gave her a serious look. "Like empowering others. And yourself. If the lesson you learned is that you can't be trusted with that power, then fine. But I get the feeling you could do so much more than you're doing right now. Am I wrong?"

Willow thought of all the Chosen Ones she'd spent the last year tracking down, some of which she'd help bury, and all the thousands of unchosen girls and boys they'd left behind in favelas, small towns and projects. "Say, why do you guys drive on the left hand side of the road, anyway…?"

 

* * *

The days carried on. She got up at daybreak to join the others for sun worship, had breakfast in the hall, spent most of the day going over Miss Harkness' papers, joined the others for evening rites and dinner and then usually went for a walk or a drive or a beer with Althanea in the evening. It was weird how _real_ it all felt, how very simple it all was; the creaking of the old bed, the rustling of the paper, the fixed hours. It felt like the library, like the dorm, like _work_. Reading all those life stories, women whose stories so much resembled her own, or just meeting them all every day, various accents and wrinkles and silly names (yeah, 'cause "Willow" was so normal, right?) and all. All these women who'd worked for decades to build up a fraction of the power she herself had accumulated in six years, who'd chosen themselves using methods she was pretty sure Tara wouldn't have approved of.

_Black or white are merely labels. If magic is part of the world, it is natural; if magic is natural, it stands to reason that anything a capable practitioner of it can achieve is no less natural than growing a tree; if the balance of the world is unfair, there can be no wrong in learning to change that balance._

She found that in the notes on a 1980s session. Willow thought about the witch in question today, Iona, a slightly absent-minded woman in her early 50s who was one of their best teachers. She tried to picture her as a teenager doing what she'd done to her asshole dad, tried to tell herself she should have used a more wholesome approach or waited for someone else to help her. She went back and read her own file.

_WR still refuses to say it was wrong to kill first victim, yet convinced she needs to be punished, as if that would undo the fact of what she did._

She remembered that session. She'd thought Miss Harkness had wanted her to say it was wrong to kill Warren, like it was some sort of twelve-step thing, and she simply couldn't. Two years of feeling bad for _not_ feeling bad.

_Ambitious; RG says he found WR in library on top of hellmouth first day he came there, spent hours there every day for years, meticulously honing magic skills without qualified guidance under very stressful conditions. RG blames self for "letting her"; curious attitude for Watcher._

She tried to remember to check in with Kennedy every evening and Buffy every few days. "Yeah, I'm gonna be a few days longer, sorry." She'd hang up and look out the window at the apple orchard, at Tamsyn tending to her trees with both shears and blessings, leaving a bit of meat for the magpies, bringing in the apples for dessert that evening, and it all felt so far away.

 

* * *

It was morning when she found the passage. In both senses of the word. She'd been going through Miss Harkness' more recent diaries, finding nothing of what she thought she was looking for. On a whim, she picked up one of the oldest diaries, and right at the back found an undated entry, an amateurish verse about "fairies at the bottom of the garden". And it wasn't so much what it said but in the way it was arranged on the page, the little curlicues she'd drawn around it, the way it … _opened_ , somehow. She looked up from reading it as if waking from a deep sleep, and felt it under her feet.

"You found it." She hadn't heard Althanea come in, but the other woman must have felt Willow's reaction. Willow's heart was still beating unlike anything she'd felt in … a long time. The hair stood up on her arms. She could _smell_ it.

"It's here, isn't it?" Willow asked. "Right under our feet. It's... " _old_ , she felt. Not like the one in Sunnydale. And not as … It felt hungry, but not mean. Fertile, more like, as if it had been waiting for ages for something to take root. "Our hellmouth had teeth. I don't think this one does."

"It did, once. Someone tamed it, way back when." Althanea put her hand up, feeling the energy. "Some of the sisters call it Merlin's Battery."

"Merlin? Really?"

"I know, right?" Althanea winked at her. "For all I know it's Puck's garden shed. But once a few dozen centuries have passed, do names really matter? Irene rediscovered it, and she knew how to tap into it when she needed. You didn't think we took down the most powerful witch in America with a few blessings and meditation, did you?"

"You could have just told me what you wanted me to look for, you know."

"And taken the chance that you would have said that no, black magic can never be used for good, magic needs to be responsible and balanced and only wielded by the Chosen Ones and all that." Althanea put her hand on Willow's. "I'm sorry if we weren't completely honest. But really, without power we're just so many hippies. The Battery let us actually make a difference. But none of us are powerful enough to unlock it, even Irene could only open that door a crack. Don't tell me you're not curious?"

Willow _gazed_ into it. She had friends who'd gone to all sorts of heavens and hells, and "hellmouth" didn't really seem very singular. "I'll have to think about it."

"Of course."

When she was alone again, Willow picked up her phone and called Kennedy. There was no answer. Oh, right, she'd gone home to New York to visit family now that WIllow was late coming back anyway, so it was 4AM for her. She let it ring anyway, while she thought about where the others would be. Xander, maybe, but she knew what he would say, and she didn't feel like pointing out to him that for all his talk of hammers he had no problems using wrecking balls when the job called for it. Giles would politely scold her on rules and not overreaching. Buffy or Dawn would ask her what Tara would have said, as if she didn't know. (For a few seconds the pain felt fresh again, like leaving something behind.) Andrew would have said something about Star Wars and balancing the Force, which had never made sense to her, hello, why does every Leia need a Vader to "balance" her? None of them would know. She clicked off in the middle of a toot.

Somewhere underneath the rubble of Sunnydale, she thought, was an old admission letter to Oxford. She'd always thought at some point she might go back and take that up. Become just an ordinary girl again.

Except this is reality.

Willow put the cell phone down and turned it off. She stepped out of the cottage, where the other witches were gathered. They joined hands in a circle with her at the centre. She opened the bottom of the garden, and they followed her hand in hand into the unknown.


End file.
